To dissolve, submerge, and cause to disappear the political or governmental system in the economic system by reducing, simplifying, decentralizing and suppressing, one after another, all the wheels of this great machine, which is called the Government or the State. --Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution

Petty Bourgeoisie of the World Unite!

5 Comments:

Kevin, I'll bet I'm not the only one who could use an explanation of your usage of " Petty Bourgeoisie" in a positive light. I remember you touched on it in your (first) book, but it's all the way across the room...

I understand. As the comic said, if the dresser drawer hadn't been all the way across the room from the bed, I'd never have been born.

Seriously, though, mutualism is a tradition that traces back to the greatest "petty bourgeois socialist" (Marx's epithet) of them all, P.J. Proudhon. And I coined the term "petty bourgeois deviationists" as a tongue-in-cheek catchall for all the political tendencies that hate both big government and big business, and support widespread dispersal of property ownership among the producing classes: mutualist and individualist anarchists, Georgists, social crediters, agrarians and distributists, and left-Rothbardians.

Not at all. "Left-Rothbardians" refers to those influenced by Rothbard's thought at the time of his attempt at a strategic alliance with the New Left ca. 1970; and those who have developed his thought in a left-wing direction to critique corporate power, from the perspective of traditionally "leftist" concerns like labor and the environment. A good example is the Movement of the Libertarian Left, founded by Samuel Edward Konkin, and its present-day offshoots like Alliance of the Libertarian Left and Blogosphere of the Libertarian Left. But left-Rothbardians are generally very firmly in the Austrian economic tradition, based on Lockean property rights, etc.